The Science Ebook Review

App

03/18/2013

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music. It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered.

The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum. A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want. B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you.

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards.

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes.

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too.

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

12/06/2012

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details.

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

10/27/2012

Angel Killer, by Deborah Blum (The Atavist, October 2012). Available via The Atavist app and for Kindle.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

With the essay Angel Killer, science historian Deborah Blum (a DTU editor) takes us into the disturbing world of Albert Fish, a serial killer who raped, murdered and ate perhaps dozens of children in New York City during the 1920s. But this essay is more than an elegant true crime story of atrocious transgression and dogged detection. It exposes the origins of a clash between the scientific and religious approaches to punishment, by reminding us of the most important aspect of the Fish case. Generally, the "Gray Man," as he was nicknamed, is remembered for his ghoulish crimes against children -- and himself, as he was fond of driving needles into his groin. In Angel Killer, however, Blum makes the case that his trial is what should go down in history. It was the first high-profile trial where psychologists argued that a murderer should not get the death penalty for reasons of insanity.

Though we hear the phrase "not guilty by reason of insanity" a lot in fiction, Blum points out that in reality it is not generally a successful plea. Even today, very few criminals are found to be insane, even when they've done things that are as beyond the pale as Fish's cannibalistic rituals. By retelling the story of Fish and the society that condemned him to death, Blum is able to explore one of the areas where scientific reason is most often swept aside for an Old Testament notion of "eye for an eye" justice. Though judges, juries, and even psychologists knew that a child killer like Fish was in fact insane and therefore unable to distinguish between right and wrong, they could not bring themselves to treat him the way psychology would demand. Instead of offering him treatment, Fish's peers resorted to an ancient and ultimately superstitious notion that he was simply evil and therefore should be struck down by the state for his acts.

Though we can see the war between scientific and religious ideas of transgression slowly building throughout Blum's essay, she never beats the reader over the head with socio-political analysis. Instead, she allows the story to speak for itself. One of the most intriguing characters to emerge, other than the mysterious Fish, is the psychologist who worked most on the killer's case. That was the young Fredric Wertham, who became famous in the 1950s for arguing that violent and sexual images in comics were inspiring juvenile delinquency in his book The Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham, who worked with many of New York's poorest populations, was eager to take on Fish's case because he was all too familiar with how little attention was usually paid to the sorts of working class and impoverished families who had lost their children to Fish's knife.

Wertham was also oddly sympathetic to Fish. After hours of interviews with the jailed killer, Wertham became convinced that Fish was absolutely insane. Aside from his known crimes, Fish also spoke to angels, mutilated himself, and had religious delusions about becoming a god. He'd even been committed to asylums a couple of times, once by his own daughter. Wertham wanted to find out how such a man could have been in and out of mental institutions without anyone ever noticing that he was violently unstable. In court, Wertham argued that Fish could not have understood that his crimes were wrong, and that he deserved life in a mental institution rather than the electric chair.

What emerges from Blum's tale of Wertham's court battle is a profound sense of our struggle as a culture to deal scientifically with mental illness. Most people fundamentally believe that criminals like Fish are "bad" and "evil" and should therefore be killed. Psychologists today still fight to convince juries and the public that some criminals have damaged minds, shaped by horrific circumstances. Fish's story, which begins with his abusive childhood in an orphanage, is a classic tale of a troubled person who was neglected and mistreated by the very institutions that were supposed to aid him. Even the psychologists who saw him as an adult, and knew about his profound delusions, released him onto the street because he was "sane enough." Instead of recovering, Fish only sank more deeply into madness.

Blum's essay is available via the Atavist app, whose enhancements make the experience of reading almost cinematic. The story begins with a haunting 1920s-era film of Staten Island ferries docking in downtown Manhattan, set to period music. Maps of the crime scenes walk us through the early twentieth century streets of New York City like we were cops on the beat. And Blum treats us to snapshots of the screaming headlines about Fish's murders and trial, which help us understand how his crimes were depicted at the time. At one point, we have the opportunity to pull up a creepy letter that Fish sent to the mother of one of his victims (complete with a warning that it may be too graphic for some readers). The multimedia extras never feel extraneous, and aid enormously with the historical scene-setting required here.

Ultimately Angel Killer is not a story of crime -- it is a story of how we understand crime. More than that, it is about how science has the opportunity to change profoundly the way we treat both criminals and the mentally ill. The tragedy is that when it comes to human atrocity, science often fails to persuade us and superstition takes over. Albert Fish was killed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1936.

In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called "the most ingenious book I read in my life." It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors.

The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who--among many other things--were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of. A razor's edge became a mountain range. In the chambers of a piece of bark, Hooke saw the first evidence of cells.

09/14/2012

Mars Curiosity, with its sky crane and all, is certainly impressive. But I'm a Cassini fan myself. It left Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It has winged around the ringed planet ever since, hurtling by Saturn's many, many moons along the way. Every year it has delivered images back to Earth that are not simply gorgeous but deeply informative about the outer zone of our Solar System. Its success and its stamina have gotten its mission extended twice. It will keep snapping pictures of Saturn and its moons until 2017, when it crashes into the planet.

I've tried to keep up with the flow of images at the Cassini web site, but after eight years of daily footage, there is just too much to handle. To appreciate everything it has found, we need curation.

One form of curation can be found at sites like Bad Astronomy, where Phil Plait regularly posts Cassini images that he finds particularly worthy. Thinx Media now provides curation of a different sort, by loading some 840 images into an app they call Cassini HD.

The images are organized into categories--starting with the planet itself, followed by images of its moons, and then its rings, and finally by false-color pictures. You can plow through the photos one at a time, swipe after swipe, or jump to two navigation systems: either a drop-down menu, or a gallery linked to a diagram of Saturn and its moons.

I preferred jumping around the Saturnian system. At the moment, my favorite moon of Saturn is Daphnis, a five-mile-wide rock that draws a thin path of ice and dust out of the planet's rings. If you like what you see, you can use Cassini HD's nicely integrated functions to email or tweet a photo, save it to the iPad's photo app, or send it to Tumblr or Facebook.

There are two big shortcomings of Cassini HD. For one thing, it's not particularly HD. You can't zoom in on details of the photos on the app. For a closer look at Titan or Enceladus, you will need to look at NASA's biggest versions of their images on their web site.

The other shortcoming is the text--the reason that I'm reviewing this app at Download the Universe. Each section of Cassini HD kicks off with a paragraph, or a few. Each photo comes with a one sentence caption, which you can expand into a longer version. But, as far as I can tell, all the text comes verbatim from NASA's web sites. I won't call this plagiarism, but I will call it disappointing. Every caption comes with an identical paragraph about the Cassini mission. One caption I came across informs you what Cassini will be doing in 2005--because it was written by someone at NASA in 2004. The captions point you to other pictures for further information, but they include the original links, so that you end up on NASA's web site instead of jumping to other images in the app. There's useful information to be gathered the text, but you will get little pleasure along the way. In this respect, Cassini HD is a far cry from The Solar System, which featured original text by the science writer Marcus Chown.

On balance, however, Cassini HD is a good value. The Solar System will set you back $13.99. Cassini HD will cost you just $1.99--and it's free tomorrow, when the app goes live. I like to know that even if I'm out of Wi-Fi range, I can always take a trip through Saturn's rings. The text may not sing, but the pictures are still transporting.

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

[Editor's note: John Dupuis, the author of this review, is the Acting Associate University Librarian at York University in Toronto. He's joined me and other Download the Universe editors on several panels about science ebooks, and he's tempered our optimism with thoughtful skepticism about how ebooks can add to civilization's body of knowledge. (What happens when no one makes Kindles anymore?) Recently, Dupuis wrote about a new ebook from TED on his own blog, Confessions of A Science Librarian. I asked him if he could write an expanded version for Download the Universe.--Carl Zimmer]

Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article--a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words--long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.

They're like TED talks, in other words, but they provide longer, more in-depth treatment than is possible in a short talk. On the surface, that's a really great idea. In practice, it can be a bit problematic--just like TED talks.

Carl Zimmer and Evgeny Morozov have gone into fairly extensive detail about the dark side of TED talks and TED books. Basically, the format encourages a kind of hip superficiality and fame-mongering. Ideas want to be famous, to paraphrase the famous saying that information wants to be free. In fact, ideas should be deep and well thought-out. And, you know, even perhaps a little on the valid side, too.

As global warming continues, the massive ice caps at Earth’s poles are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Water once safely anchored in glacial ice is surging into the sea. The flow could become a deluge, and millions of people living near coastlines are in danger. Inundation could impact every nation on earth. But scientists don’t yet know how fast this polar ice will melt, or how high our seas could rise. In an effort to find out, a team of renowned and quirky geologists takes a 4,000-mile road trip across Western Australia. They collect fossils and rocks from ancient shorelines and accumulate new evidence that ancient sea levels were frighteningly high during epochs when average global temperatures were barely higher than today. In Deep Water veteran environmental journalist, radio producer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Grossman explores the new and fascinating science — and scientists — of sea-level rise. His investigation turns up both startling and worrisome evidence that humans are upsetting a delicate natural equilibrium. If knocked off balance, it could hastily melt the planet’s ice and send sea levels soaring.

A couple of months ago, I attended a trade show for the processed food industry. There, wandering among booths hawking hydrolyzed vegetable protein, phosphate, and guar gum, I learned that despite its implication in the obesity epidemic, the processed food industry views itself as a direct descendant of Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization process—a provider of safe food for millions. This was profoundly unsettling, and I was relieved when I happened across a pair of NASA food scientists standing before a poster. In space, how food is preserved and packaged isn’t a matter of merchandizing. It is still, as in the days of Pasteur, a matter of survival.

This thesis and the science you need to know to understand it are presented in Space Nutrition, a free ebook put together by members of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. Though it makes extremely limited use of multimedia (warning: it only functions in the landscape orientation), Space Nutrition is a passable introduction to the special difficulties of getting a balanced diet in space, where bone loss is a given, nutrients are absorbed differently than on Earth, and everything must have a long shelf life. Perhaps more importantly, it's a window into the enthusiasms and curiosity of the scientists who wrote it.

The book, which is pitched at children grades 5-8, grew out of a long-running space nutrition newsletter [pdf], and this heritage may be responsible for its poor organization. There are sections, for example, called “Space Food” and “Space Flight Research” in the chapter called Nutrition, but the chapter called Space Flight Nutrition has only one section, entitled “Being Healthy is not Just About Nutrition (even though we like to think it is!)” (caps theirs). Frustratingly, the details of how space flight affects the human body and the nutrients in food are never enumerated in one place. This hampers its usefulness as a primer.

But for me, and I suspect for any kids reading it, the book's primary charm is in the photographs and asides that you can’t find in a Wikipedia article on the subject. One photogallery is full of snapshots taken by excited Nutritional Biochemistry Lab members as they drive to Kennedy Space Center to pick up astronaut blood samples from the ISS, which they use to determine the effects of space flight on nutrient absorption, bones, and muscles. The shots of the Experiment Payload truck that retrieves the samples and of the little blue NASA duffel bags they are carried home in give the process of space research a refreshing physicality.

And spaceflight seen from a food scientist's point of view is endearingly kooky. Crumbs are a big no-no for space foods—they fly around and clog the instruments. Tortillas that last almost a year, on the other hand, are a very exciting development, the authors write, because you would need three hands to make a traditional sandwich with two slices of bread and a slice of baloney in space. The book's history of manned spaceflight missions reads like no other you'll find. Gemini: Shrimp cocktail, chicken and vegetables, pudding, applesauce. Apollo: bread slices, cheddar cheese spread, frankfurters, fruit juice. Skylab: steak, vanilla ice cream.

These colorful details, at least for me, don't quite make up for the organizational problems. But the book is free, and if you or your kid are interested in space flight or astronaut food, it's certainly worth downloading.

The book also raises the hope, however faint, that perhaps someday we will seek to turn the considerable power of food science not towards making potato chips fly off the shelves, or devising yet more uses for soy protein, but towards getting humans on other planets.

06/22/2012

College students slogging through a literature course have a tried and true method for keeping up with the reading: Chuck the book and read a synopsis instead.

Nowadays this can be as easy as a book's Wikipedia entry. A look at the page for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice reveals character lists, maps of relationships, major themes, plot devices and even conversions of Georgian-era property values to 2010 dollars. A more specialized breed of online study site goes further, giving chapter-by-chapter synopses, study questions and sample topics for book reports.

In the olden days before Internet time, students didn't get summaries through social media. They bought commercial book notes. These are still around, and CliffsNotes, SparkNotes and other series have moved into the digital age with online offerings in addition to the traditional study pamphlets. Even in the Internet age, there's a rich market for pre-digested literature.

06/15/2012

The Island of Secrets, by Matthew Power. Published by the Atavist. $1.99 - $2.99. iPad and iPhone version available through the Atavist app. Kindle, Nook. More information available from The Atavist.

Guest reviewed by Oliver Hulland

Matthew Power is the kind of writer everyone dreams of becoming. In the vein of John McPhee and Paul Theroux, Power writes about exotic far-away places, not from second-hand accounts but instead from personal experience. The cuts, bruises, insect bites, and close encounters he records are just as likely to be his own as the adventurers he profiles.

The Island of Secrets is Power's most recent attempt to understand the indomitable urge to explore. We find ourselves thrust into the world of John Lane, a California scientist who looks for fossils in caves and who had accidentally discovered a new species of tree kangaroo on the side of the road while on an expedition in New Britain, an island off the coast of New Guinea. Upon learning of its novelty he later returned for the specimen only to find that it had, to his dismay, been eaten. And so Lane, with Power in tow, mounted another expedition to rediscover the kangaroo he believes holds the key to preserving what's left of the island's vanishing forests.

The Island of Secrets reads like a twenty-first-century explorer's diary, rich with multimedia content documenting an expedition deep into New Britain's jungles. Inline links pop open locations on maps, historical factoids, or images from Power's trip. The intimate photos provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the haphazard expedition, including shots of an impromptu shoddily-made raft, the science team's dilapidated jungle base camp, and the odd detail like a local's "Calvin Klain" underwear.

While the quality of the photographs are nothing like those found in glossy magazines, they serve as evidence of the journalistic process, and of the realities of Power's research in New Britain. Even better than the photographs, though, are the small video clips that are peppered throughout the text. One clip records a slapdash attempt to sew shut a careless machete wound, while another shows the slow, laborious process of hacking through the dense Tanglefoot fern underbrush. These short clips are the antithesis of slick BBC nature documentaries, and as a result they succeed in providing gritty, blurry proof of the day-to-day struggle of science in far-away places.

Along with the text, The Atavist app also includes a superbly produced audiobook version, ready by Power himself. You can also listen to snippets of sounds from the jungle including the whirring of cicadas or samples of the local language, Tok Pisin. Some may find these audio-visual elements distracting or unnecessary (notably the looped chirping crickets that function as a soundtrack), more often than not they work in concert to create one of the richest media experiences available on an iPad or iPhone.

None of this would work, however, if it weren't for Power's talent in telling the story of John Lane's obsession with finding the tree kangaroo. By building off the foundation of a good story, The Atavist’s adaptation of The Island of Secrets creates a hybrid of narrative nonfiction that succeeds in bringing the journalistic and scientific process to life.

Oliver Hulland is the editor of Cool Tools, a site dedicated to finding tools that really work. When not reviewing tools, he can be found foraging for mushrooms, exploring caves, and applying to medical school.

06/11/2012

When I was in fourth grade, I went to my first and only play date at my then-best friend's house. (We were just old enough that a boy-girl best friendship felt transgressive.) He showed me the periodic table poster in his bedroom, his mother stopped us drinking our sodas half-way through because they had aspartame, and we watched a NOVA special on sub-atomic physics.

It was in that suburban living room that I first fell subject to the power of the science TV program. The glittering animations, the serious but warm voice-over, the waves of knowledge washing over us. And sometimes, the enthusing host: Carl Sagan with his hair held aloft by an ocean wind. Neil de Grasse Tyson in a loud print shirt getting worked up about Isaac Newton. Their personalities and passions are the conduit not just into learning science, but learning to love it.

Brian Cox's Brian Cox's The Wonders of the Universe is one of the new attempts to render this experience portable, bringing Brian Cox – Manchester accent, wind-swept hair and all – into your hands in the form of an app for the iPad 2 or 3.